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Something that has helped me engage in dialogue better with others is remembering that while I often have a very strong and nuanced position, it’s still just that - a position, a perspective, a single way of perceiving the world.
And all of the texts I read, all of the stuff I learn: it’s also all perspective, all abstract representations that people construct to better represent the realities of the world that they are observing and engaging in.
What we are engaged in with discourse is often a game of representing and naming, of pointing and explaining, and it helps to see all communicative work as emerging from this positioning and repositioning. The only thing beyond this is art and poetry and performance and so on.
Sometimes in the moment, I forget this. I am still trying to get better at listening, which also involves detaching my ego from the positions that I hold, seeing difference as difference and not as the diminishing of my truth — this kind of emotional work to be a better thinker.
And, oh, the poetry thing: poetry is language that does not function as language. It’s the sound of language breaking, being broken, and the something else that emerges from that breaking. Art, performance: other forms of breaking. But when we are engaged in discourse...
It’s different. We don’t break. We state what we perceive, based on the representations of the world that we have learned to be able to produce for ourselves as we couple those perceptions with the objects before us. There’s no one answer. But there are strong ones. And politics.
Because more than our perspectives alone, our perspectives hold political discourse, even when we do not recognize our discourse as political, even when we do not realize the political aspects of what we believe to be a particular politics. There is always more than we know.
Everything we say, when understood in a different context, holds implications beyond what we meant to say. Language betrays is. It shows us things that we did not intent for. It shows us what was within our way of knowing, and so discourse is also often listening to your self.
At the heart of all of this is a call for us to listen, not because we should be kind to each other, but because we should allow for all our experiences to inform us, and we should be open to hearing what it is that others sense our politics to be. What our words are doing.
Up to an extent, of course. A politics based in valorizing patriarchy and colonialism and white supremacy has no place in our work, and can be immediately discarded. But most things, I think, we can allow for. And we can grow. I’m trying, you know, every day, to do this.
